Study: Gambling Affects Brain Like Drugs

W A S H I N G T O N, May 25

The brains of people anticipating a win at the roulette table appear to react much like those taking euphoria-inducing drugs.

A team of investigators reports in Thursday's issue of the
journal Neuron that the parts of the brain that respond to the
prospects of winning and losing money while gambling are the same
as those that appear to respond to cocaine and morphine.

The overlap of brain activity seen in the gambling experiment
with that found in earlier studies of drug use indicates, the
researchers said, that the brain uses the same circuitry for "the
processing of diverse rewards."

"The results of our gaming experiment, coupled with findings
from prior studies of the anticipation and experience of positive
and negative outcomes in humans and laboratory animals, suggest
that a network of interrelated structures ... coordinate the
processing of goal-related stimuli," the team led by Dr. Hans C.
Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital said.

Next Challenge: Mapping the Neural Pathways

A challenge for the future, he said, is to determine how
different parts of these brain circuits affect the thinking,
emotion and motivation involved in anticipation, evaluation, and
decision-making.

"Identifying these regions of the brain and mapping the neural
pathways that process the anticipation and 'rewards' associated
with drug abuse would be a tremendous boost to the development of
medications or interventions that could block these circuits and
provide other treatment approaches," said Dr. Alan I. Leshner,
director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The research was
supported by NIDA, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

The research team led by Breiter used magnetic resonance imaging
to map the brain responses of 12 men while they participated in a
game of chance involving winning or losing money.

They found that in the gambling experiment, blood flow to the
brain changed in ways similar to that seen in other experiments
during an infusion of cocaine in subjects addicted to that drug and
to low doses of morphine in drug-free individuals.

The changes varied in accordance with the amount of money
involved, and a broadly distributed set of brain regions were
involved in anticipating a win. The more money involved, the more
excited the person became.

The primary response to winning, or the prospect of winning, was
seen in the right hemisphere of the brain, while the left
hemisphere was more active in response to losing, the researchers
reported.

Besides Breiter, the research team included Peter Shizgal of
Concordia University in Montreal, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton
University and Anders Dale and Itzhak Aharon, both of Massachusetts
General Hospital.